The Galactic Mage (10 page)

How many men had died upon Prosperion’s vast and open seas, died seeking for the sake of curiosity? And what were oceans compared to this? What was this for a Six?

But he knew as he looked up into the star-spotted heavens that he would dare to seek them anyway. He was not a Six, he told himself. And he would not die like one. But he would dare to face the gods if there really were any of them to see. Finnius Addenpore had defied them and never left his tower. Perhaps that was the reason why; perhaps he should have gone to them instead. Either way, Altin was not afraid. If the gods were out there, that was fine by him. He would fly up and greet them, fly through one of those little lighted vents, right up into their world and say “hello” in his most robust and daring voice. “Hello,” he would say. “I am Altin Meade, and I am not afraid. I have found you, and there are some things I want to say.”

He felt himself fill with hope and yearning and, unexpectedly, with anger and despair. What things? He felt tears come into his eyes, tears burning far away from here. Tears of a man on Kurr right now alone, apart even from himself.

The strange wave of emotion passed, replaced by a more humble sense of awe, the sense of which was still incredible and that kept him lingering, dreamlike, for quite some time. Finally, after he had no idea how long, a rumble in his belly reminded him of passing time. An image of himself shifted in his mind, changed from a triumphant Altin to a less god-defying one, an Altin sitting in a puddle of his own drool and staring out an asylum window filled with bars. He decided that perhaps it was time to call it a night.

With one last glimpse up into the stars, Altin let the mana go.

Chapter
9

T
he elevator was halfway to the bridge when the first impact shook the ship to its rivets. Orli was nearly knocked off her feet as the elevator lights dimmed and the memory stick in her hands clattered to the floor. The jolt was over as fast as it had come, and Orli scrambled to retrieve the evidence of her latest discovery. She wondered what had just happened to the ship.

She was immediately dismayed when the battle stations alarm was called and red lights in the elevator began to flash. The door slid open onto the bridge where Captain Asad was barking orders and trying to calm his flabbergasted crew. “Strap in, everyone. Do it now, and keep your heads. This is what you’re trained for.”

Orli heard the clicking of buckles and the slide of rough restraints being pulled taut around several nervous sets of bowels. But there was something in the captain’s cold, ever-present sternness, normally so damnably annoying, that had an immediate mellowing effect. She could see it working on the bridge crew as they prepared themselves to fight. It seemed the Hostiles were finally at hand.

“Carrey, hard to starboard. Face it. Give it a smaller target if nothing else. Hartford, eighty percent to forward shields. Let’s get a lock on that thing. Levi, lasers at full and arm the nukes.”

“Yes, sir,” came in unison from the three as they immediately set themselves to task. Orli watched with mouth agape, barely remembering to step through the elevator door before it closed.

The image on the huge forward monitor showed a large object, an orb of indeterminate size, hovering somewhere outside the ship. She glanced out the two long narrow windows that ran round the forward corners of the bridge but couldn’t see it through either one.

“What the hell is that thing?” Roberto asked, his eyes darting briefly to the screen above as his fingers tapped at his controls.

“Hartford?” said the captain, redirecting the question to the young lieutenant to Roberto’s left.

“Still scanning, sir,” she answered, her fingers matching Roberto’s for speed as they both played upon the lights beneath the console glass. Captain Asad scowled at the monitor, his impatience checked only by the sheer force of his disciplined inner core. Finally Hartford gave a reply. “It scans like a planet, Captain. Metals, silicates and trace organics.” She paused a moment, rechecking to be sure, “Yeah, it’s all there.”

“How big is it?” the captain demanded, squinting out through the window to the left of the main monitor trying to find it in the night.

“Eighty meters in diameter, sir, perfectly round. Very dense. Three-point-two grams per cubic centimeter.”

“Which means?”

“Thick, sir. Very dense.”

“Like a moon, then?”

“Possibly, sir.”

“Well, then what the hell hit us? It couldn’t have been that thing. We’d already be dead.”

“I have it here, sir,” piped in Roberto. “Look.”

“Put it up,” Captain Asad ordered. An instant later a lower quarter of the main screen held an image of a long shaft of a dark substance, stone-like, hurtling away from both the ship and the strange orb. “What the hell is that?”

“Granite, sir,” came Hartford’s quick reply. “Granite, traces of obsidian, gold and lead.”

“What? Are you telling me that thing threw a goddamn rock at us?”

“Yes, sir. That appears to be the case. The… missile,” Lieutenant Hartford seemed to hesitate for want of a better term, “is moving away from us at five hundred and eighty knots.”

It was then that the coarse looking sphere began moving at them again. It did not start slowly and accelerate as a ship would have had to do, from dead stop and gradually increasing velocity, but instead it was instantly in motion, careening directly at them at an astonishing speed.

“Impact in eleven seconds, sir,” Lieutenant Hartford informed them.

“Evasive action,” ordered the captain.

“On it, sir,” said Ensign Carrey. Orli gripped the doorframe of the elevator as she watched in utter shock. She knew enough about the ship’s maneuverability to know that there was nothing Carrey could do. Those paltry little aspect rockets were useless in a situation like this. She wondered if she were watching her death blow on its way. From the way the tendons showed in the captain’s neck and the way Roberto kept glancing up at the monitor on the wall as he frantically keyed the controls, she could tell she was not the only one.

“Shoot it, Levi. Shoot it now, goddamn it.”

“Already on it,” Roberto said, tapping a light that was finally blinking beneath his sweating fingertips. “Lasers hot, in two, one, firing.”

Streaks of red light darted into the sky, splashing upon the surface of the onrushing orb and creating a dull orange glow. The orb shifted its trajectory immediately, not a diversion or the angular movement of changing course, but an impossible switch of its location to a path that was slightly left of where it just had been. Not a great distance, but enough to leave the lasers firing out into the stars, swinging hopelessly after the orb, but no longer on the track. The glowing hot spot on its surface immediately cooled and went away.

“Get it back, Levi. What the hell was that?”

“… I don’t know,” stammered Roberto. “The computer had it locked. It shouldn’t have lost it. Maybe a glitch.” Orli could hear the dull sound of Roberto’s fingertips tapping the console, his flesh thumping against the glass as he desperately tried to get the lasers back onto the surface of the orb.

Finally he did, but this time, the orb didn’t glow beneath the attack of focused light. Nor did it make any effort to change its course. It sped away a short distance and once more came to a complete stop, allowing the lasers to beam on it steadily now, apparently unconcerned.

“Something’s different, sir,” reported Lieutenant Hartford.

“I can see that,” he said. “What happened to the lasers? They were working a second ago.”

“That’s what I’m telling you, Captain,” Hartford pressed. “It’s different. Its surface shifted—is shifting. Look.” She punched up a zoom on the monitor and suddenly the view closed in on the surface of the orb.

At first the orb’s surface had appeared to be rough and mottled brown, but now it was fading to solid black, its surface transforming before their eyes. The area upon which the lasers beamed was already completely black and had become smooth, glassy and highly polished like a mirror. In seconds, the lasers were doing nothing to the orb at all, and the crew watched bewildered as the ship’s lasers were split into a million smaller beams of light, divided into fragments as thin as wire and reflected harmlessly into space. The rest of the orb was changing color and texture too, the rough brown vanishing as if being devoured by an onslaught of glazed black.

“What in the good goddamn is that?” the captain demanded. He was getting tired of asking questions and irritation began to creep into his voice.

“Obsidian,” Hartford replied a moment later. “Volcanic glass.”

“Shouldn’t the lasers melt that?”

“Yes, sir, they should. Apparently it’s not exactly the same obsidian that we have back on Earth.”

“Apparently.”

“Nuke it,” ordered the captain. “Send two.”

“Yes, sir,” said Roberto.

The orb was suddenly on the move again, once more coming straight at them.

“Nuke it now, Ensign.”

“Firing, sir.”

The missiles streaked out from beneath the ship, their passage marked by the blue flames of their rocket trails. Everyone on the deck, including the still unnoticed Orli, watched breathlessly as they hurtled towards the orb.

The orb came on in the face of the missiles, seemingly unconcerned. It shifted its position again, just at the point of impact, too quick to see, and didn’t lose a moment charging onward towards the ship. The two missiles shot harmlessly by and began to dim with distance against the backdrop of the stars, target lost.

“Oh my God,” shouted Roberto at the screen. “Did you see that shit? Goddamn it, there is no way I missed that shot, sir. They can’t do that. It’s impossible. Nothing moves like that.”

“Calm yourself, Ensign. Bring them back,” ordered the captain. “Hit it when it passes by. Make sure they’re far enough away.”

“Yes, sir,” said Roberto, tapping in commands to swing both missiles around and muttering anxiously under his breath.

Orli was in complete agreement with her friend. She’d watched it happen too. The orb had just, well, not been where it was anymore. The first time she’d seen it, it seemed like a really eye-defying move, but not this time. There could be no mistake. That orb had shifted its place in space. There was no other way to describe it. Quick as a blink, one second it was there, the next it was beside itself, as if the space itself had moved. The maneuver was, as Roberto had pointed out, impossible. Physics did not allow for such a thing.

“Brace yourselves,” the captain ordered, clutching the rail at which he stood. He alone was not strapped in. He and Orli, who, unnoticed, did not yet count.

“Impact in seven, six, five…,” counted down Lieutenant Hartford.

At roughly a hundred yards away, the orb once again made one of its impossible spatial shifts, and in the breadth of a breath, it shot harmlessly by, just missing the ship by a few meters to the port side. But in its place, and still quite on target, came another of the long granite shafts, thick as the I-beams comprising the framework of the ship and plunging at them with horrifying velocity.

Fingers beating upon the console, Roberto forsook the vanishing nukes and managed to fire a laser instead, just at the last moment, and not with enough energy to destroy it, but with enough to push the orb’s projectile slightly to the side, just off course. Still, it struck the ship a glancing blow that was hard enough to throw Orli to the ground. The captain nearly fell as well, but managed to keep his footing with help from the sturdy rail.

The ship’s targeting cameras followed the granite shaft out into the stars. The captain noticed on the main view that the orb had actually gone off to retrieve the first of its mineral missiles still hurtling into space.

“Is that thing actually chasing down its first shot?” he queried his sensors officer.

Hartford tapped up the zoom on the aft camera. Sure enough it was. They watched in amazement as the orb pursued its missile and, passing it by slightly, moved directly into the projectile’s path. The orb slowed then, allowing the granite weapon to strike dead center in the middle of its bulk. Rather than dealing damage, however, the shaft vanished inside the orb, slipping back into the surface as if the orb were made of nothing more than mud.

“What in the hell?” the question came from everyone on the deck, whether spoken aloud or not. Including Orli, who did speak it aloud, and suddenly all eyes were on her.

“Pewter! What the hell are you doing up here? There’s a battle stations alert.” The captain’s face was instantly red, and Orli knew that every comment he’d ever made about her unfitness for military service had just been confirmed for him. “Get back to your station, goddamn it.”

The look on Roberto’s face seemed to suggest that he too was incredulous as to why she was here standing on the bridge. She met his eyes with a grimace and shrugged, holding up her video stick in attempt at some defense. Apparently now was not the time.

“I, I…,” she stammered. “I found something I thought you’d like to see.” The heat coming off of the captain silenced her. “It can wait.” She turned and jabbed at the elevator control, willing the doors to open with all her mental strength.

“It’s coming back, sir,” said Lieutenant Hartford, inadvertently coming to Orli’s aid. “Impact in fifteen, fourteen….”

“Roberto, pull off another shot like that last one and you’re a lieutenant come breakfast, you hear me?” Orli was no longer on the captain’s mind.

“Yes, sir,” came Roberto’s reply.

The ship shuddered again just as the elevator door slid open and Orli prepared to step inside.

“Got it,” cried Roberto triumphantly just as the missile bounced off the ship’s beleaguered shields. “Little sooner than the last time.”

“Figure out a way to keep them off of us completely, and I’ll recommend you for promotion to admiral before the day is done.”

“Yes, sir,” Roberto said with growing confidence. “You got yourself a deal.”

“Your chance is on its way,” announced Hartford immediately after Roberto spoke. The orb had retrieved the second projectile already and was now rushing at them for yet another shot.

Roberto was quick enough on this pass to time the lasers just as the mineral shaft began to emerge. He managed to hit the tip of it and knock it entirely off course.

“Good work, Ensign,” complimented Captain Asad again. “Is that you, or the computers?”

“Me, sir. If you watch real close, it turns sort of yellowish, like sand or something, right before it shoots. You got to time it off of that, I think.”

“Keep it up.”

“Yes, sir.”

The orb retrieved its first shaft again and swung round to make another attempt. Orli found herself too mesmerized to leave and dawdled at the elevator, holding the door open and reluctant to press the button that would take her down.

“Why do you think it keeps doing that?” Carrey wondered aloud. “It’s like it only has two bullets or something.”

“That’s probably exactly why,” agreed the captain. “It has to conserve resources just like we do.”

It came in for another pass, and again Roberto was able to misdirect its shot, although only by a matter of inches this time, causing the captain to growl and Hartford to shoot him a sideways glance.

“It’s not a perfect science,” Roberto said with a negligible shrug.

“I saw the yellow spot this time, though,” confirmed Hartford.

“So did I,” said the captain. “And I bet it’s soft as a baby’s belly. Roberto….”

“On it, sir,” said Roberto, anticipating the captain’s command. “I’ll have a missile on its way too. Going to be tough, though. Missiles are slow.”

Again the orb came round and made its pass. Everyone on the bridge, including Orli, was staring at the screen looking for the telltale yellow spot. By the time Orli spotted the sandy colored dot, Roberto already had both lasers playing on the emerging shaft, and the blue dot of a nuclear missile was streaking towards it too.